


Such Space to Cross

by hotot



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Angst with a Smutty Ending, Assassination, Canon-Typical Violence, Demisexuality, Developing Relationship, Feelings, First Dates, Fluff, Garrus's Loyalty Mission, Multi, POV Alternating, Polyamory, Thane's Loyalty Mission, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-15
Updated: 2016-11-26
Packaged: 2018-08-31 06:19:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8567338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hotot/pseuds/hotot
Summary: The staging of paradox made for high drama: She would lose him if he pulled the trigger. He would pull the trigger. She could not lose him.
    Thane observes Shepard's methods during Garrus's loyalty mission, and is forcibly reminded of another time when someone had the guts to stare down a sniper's scope. Soul searching, grief, recovery, questions. It's easy to find more than you were expecting when you weren't expecting anything at all.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This stands on its own, so I've pulled it from an an old fic. I just love Thane's take on Garrus's loyalty mission.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Thane has some thoughts about Garrus and Shepard's intense friendship.

The comets  
Have such a space to cross,

Such coldness, forgetfulness.  
So your gestures flake off ----

_The Night Dances - Sylvia Plath_

 

 **Thane**  

 

 

  _Honey colored eyes, defiant in the scope._

_Do you dare?_

Thane’s breath caught in his throat—not from Kepral’s this time, and not lost in his eidetic memory but rather from seeing one of those memories played out before him right here on the Citadel. This wasn’t a memory now, but the present, and it wasn’t the first time Commander Shepard took his breath away. It wouldn’t be the last.

Garrus had Sidonis in his scope, his lust for vengeance blinding him to a  _Siha’s_  desires. She was afraid. She was right to be afraid for Garrus—his body was awake but his mind was in battle sleep, dreaming of vengeance that the body was forced to act out.

The staging of paradox made for high drama: She would lose him if he pulled the trigger. He would pull the trigger. She could not lose him. 

They were at an impas. Stalemate, as the humans called it. But _Siha_ would not be bested, nor stalled, nor ignored.

Thane had never seen a bond between a turian and a human before, not like this. They read each other’s minds on the field, and Garrus always had a moment to make her smile, remind her that she was strong and good, even when she wasn’t. Because she was afraid she wasn’t. Thane knew that feeling all to well. And Shepard always believed in Garrus—knew that he was pure and whole, even when the scars reminded him that he wasn't. Because he wasn't. She reminded him that of the two of them, he was the unbroken one. He'd never _died._

Thane silently watched her struggle and question Garrus relentlessly throughout the mission, trying to reason and bargain her way to some sort of resolution that would satisfy them both. 

Memory flared as Thane took his place behind Garrus on the catwalk.

 _”I didn’t shoot him.” Garrus walks away, predator-stalking and demanding that his vengeance-lust be sated._ Siha _is trying not to sadness-laugh at his frustration as she lengthens her stride to keep up. It is funny because Garrus is funny and not because killing is funny- he always makes her laugh and the alternative to laughter in this case is_ unfathomable _. Behind the laugh she is afraid. He cannot be stopped by any conventional means. Harkin stirs on the floor in their burning wake, rubbing his head._

She wasn’t laughing now, in the way of Garrus's shot. She put her body between Garrus and the traitor, asking with her back, the slight twist of her head, her eyes, her being: _Does he dare?_ Thane wonders. If Garrus changed position he could get a shot, right through the side of Sidonis’s head. _Siha_ would be in the way, but his vengeance screamed that it was an acceptable risk, and with Garrus at the trigger she was not in any danger because he had _really_ good aim. Unless she took the bullet.

He remembers.

 _Lazer-dot trembles on her chest. You smell her, spice on a spring wind. She stares at you through the scope, how_ dare _you! A question: Why would someone die for a stranger?_

Shepard wouldn't. She wouldn’t. _Would she?_ Thane would stop any of that from happening, of course. He sat close by Garrus, cloaked and ready. 

_Side approach, low kick to knee, grab arm and pull into leg lock to trigger pain response, finger-stab under eye plates and..._

No. No broken neck for Vakarian, but if Garrus wanted his vengeance badly enough to go through a _Siha_ , he could _try_. Thane released a shaking breath, letting his shoulders relax, letting the red cool from his vision.

Sidonis’s voice crackled over the comm, punitive and hollow. She amplified the signal so Garrus could get every word.

“I didn’t want to do it! I didn’t have a choice. They got to me, said they’d kill me if I didn’t help. What was I supposed to do?”

_Die._

A low rumble in Garrus’s sub-harmonics echoed in Thane.

“I wake up every night, sick. Sweating. Each of their faces, staring at me. Accusing me. I’m already a dead man… some days, I just want it to be over.”

“We can arrange that,” Garrus was talking, but more importantly, he was listening.

Thane felt Shepard smile and heard her sigh into the comm with resignation. “If that’s what you want.”

The words weren’t for Sidonis: they belonged to Garrus.

 _Do you dare want this?_   She seemed to ask.

The moment teetered on the brink, one reality or another about to be born. _Which would it be?_ Thane wondered.

Sidonis was already a dead man walking. _Siha_ had just revealed that for Garrus’s sake, twisting reality to suit her desires as she always did. Thane recalled the story of Commander Shepard talking the Spectre, Saren into suicide on the Citadel, not far from this very ward. She could make anything happen to suit her will, just so. Keeping Sidonis talking was a brilliant tactic—more manipulative than Thane had thought her capable of. In his experience, direct, willful people were not often the most ready to grasp nuance. Shepard’s will was different, though. She had an indelible sense of rightness, but she did not conduct futile and full frontal assaults on reality. Rather, she followed threads of meaning, gathering them until she had enough to twist circumstances into a tapestry of her desired outcomes.

Rightness as felt sense, transmuted into reality by her will, like some blood-soaked alchemist. It was the very definition of a _Siha_. She did not merely hold opinions and act upon them, she created truth.

It was a good thing that her desires so often lined up with the needs of those who served her. Indeed, her desires often _stemmed_ from the needs of others. Empathy was this _Siha’s_ defining trait.

She transmuted her turian’s bullet from one of vengeance into one of mercy, and Vakarian was helpless before her.

 _Siha_ stepped aside, and Sedonis whispered thank you, and Vakarian… took a breath and squeezed the trigger. Thane didn’t think he was going to, but he pulled the trigger. This story was different, after all. The high velocity shot did not make much noise, no more than the soft, sharp whump of air being displaced at near the speed of sound. Someone out on the ward screamed. Sidonis lay boneless dead in a pool of turian-blue blood.

Shepard looked up at Garrus, who had not moved since taking the shot. He was studying her intently through the scope, sniper’s pose held. Thane held his own position behind Garrus on the catwalk—he would not move until he was sure the main actors had left the stage. The only one breathing in that moment was Shepard, chest heaving. Thane wondered what those honey colored eyes were saying to Garrus through his view down the rifle’s sights.

Thane imagined he could hear her thinking, almost as if it were a memory.

 _I_ _need you whole. I need you…_

Ah. This was more than a twisting of reality to suit her will, to make her team strong, to make Garrus complete. This was more than doing a favor for a friend. This was a bond of love, forged in blood. She had compromised herself for him, and now they would never be apart. Drell could not see the future, but Thane could see what was written between two people plainly enough.

Did Vakarian know? Thane doubted it. Lucky, clueless man with a hot and literal mind. Vakarian couldn’t fathom that someone like Shepard was in love with him, probably couldn’t imagine Shepard in love with anyone. But, she would not be idle. She would be the one to make it known. And he would know soon. Maybe not right away because Shepard would give him time to adjust to the new reality of being an arch-angel of mercy and not of vengeance, but there was no way he could not reciprocate. Garrus would wake from his battle sleep and find that a _Siha_ had chosen him. Thane only hoped Garrus would prove more worthy of a _Siha’s_ blessings, and more resilient to her curses than Thane himself had ever been.

He felt a twinge of jealousy. Thane desired Shepard, spiritually, physically, mentally, sexually, this _Siha_  who was his second chance. But men like Thane didn’t get second chances, and Shepard was a footnote on a life unlived, right towards the end, at the dying part. He would not intrude any more deeply into her life when she had so much more of it to live, but he could at least watch the story unfold.

Yes, he would watch this story happen again, without him, and take vicarious pleasure in it. 

_Honey colored eyes, defiant in the scope._

It was the thing Thane liked about stories, about archetypes. They helped him make sense of horrible things, in the same way Shepard made sense of conflict with her will, made her own stories that somehow rhymed with his. With enough will, believing made it so.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Garrus is a poop. He gets better, promise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This turned into something longer. Rated explicit for future smut because I am weak for this polyship.

 

 

**Garrus**

Garrus was surprised when Thane asked him to help track down his missing son on the Citadel. It was no surprise that Shepard was helping Thane, of course-- it was his turn after all. Shepard worked her way relentlessly through the crew, hammering out their drama for them, forging them into something stronger for all her attention and for the catharsis. Well, it seemed like everyone grew stronger, sharper, more focused... except him.

Garrus just felt brittle.

It had been days since the Sidonis fiasco, and Garrus could count the number of times he and Shepard had spoken casually on one hand, and he only _had_ three fingers. He’d only used one so far.

What surprised him about the mission was that Thane asked him directly. Not orders from Shepard. No briefing. It was a personal favor. Thane blinked both eyelids at him in the gloom of the main battery and put a hand on Garrus's arm, light, cool pressure and huge black eyes taking every weigh and measure. It wasn’t quite a “please” but it was close as Krios could get.

On the Citadel he trailed behind the drell and the human. Thane scoffed at the security measures, and Garrus agreed, his tone dark and brittle. Thane smirked. Garrus hung back as they talked to Bailey, and hung further back when they got to the wards, as Shepard and Thane questioned a young human kid about an assassination plot. The kid nearly jumped out of his skin at the sight of two deadly ghosts. He didn’t need a scarred and bitter turian standing over him, too.

“Be still, Mouse. You can change your pants in a moment.”

Garrus managed to stifle his snicker, shocked that the first person who made him laugh since he spilled Sidonis’s blood was not Shepard, but Krios.

He started paying attention to the mission.

The kid knew Thane, Garrus noted. The kid _loved_ Thane, or had, at one time.

Once Mouse had given them the information and fled, Garrus approached.

Thane was lost in his memories.

“Mouse knew more about my life then Koylat ever did…” The drell’s head bowed, hands folded. “He wants to know that I’ll remember him. That anyone will remember him.”

Garrus felt Shepard lean in, providing solemn witness to her friend’s regrettable past, the loss, the pain he had caused, the harm absence had wrought on those he had loved. A wife and child, abandoned.

“You can’t blame yourself,” she said, voice quiet. Garrus disagreed. The harm his absence had wrought… Thane had told him of his wife, of the funeral, how they’d slipped her white shrouded body into the sea and his son had screamed not to let her go. Shepard wasn’t the only one spending time in Life Support.

_Spirits, is that what happens when you couldn’t… couldn’t be there… for someone who… you..._

“If I do not, who will?” Thane replied, and his gaze slipped past Shepard’s shoulder to meet Garrus’s eyes.

Then they headed back to C-Sec.

Was this why Thane had asked Garrus to come along? If the assassin thought that Garrus had any pull in S-Cec these days, he was sorely and hilariously mistaken. Spectre status would get them a lot further, a lot more quickly. Garrus stood sullen and useless in the hall, poking at his omnitool while Thane and Shepard interrogated the perp. He dreaded the long minutes he’d have to stand alone, nodding at familiar faces or pretending to ignore them, depending on the levels of hostility, disdain, or-- he shuddered, _hero worship_ the C-Sec officers met him with. Thank the Spirits his father was on Palaven, or this would turn into a father-son falling out double feature.

 _Look busy_ , _and no one will even notice it’s you, now that half your face is missing_.

But he needn't have worried because Thane and Shepard were out of the interrogation room within ninety seconds of entering. Thane’s eyes held a feverish awe Garrus had never seen in him before, staring at their Commander with a look that made Garrus shift awkwardly between amused and annoyed. Garrus had thought the Thane immune to Shepard’s way with people, but apparently not even a stoic, hanar trained drell could resist her blunt-force charm.

He was still mad at her for the crazy varren shit she pulled regarding Sidonis, but yeah, Garrus could admit that she had charm.

_What’s she done now?_

She looked much too pleased with herself, and for a moment she glanced his way and flashed him one of _those_ smiles, apparently forgetting that they were strictly on business terms. Amusement and annoyance intensified their endless stalemate in the theater of war that was his chest, and the thought of her pulling some crazy intimidation stunt shifted the battlefront towards the vicinity of his heart. He wished he could have seen it.

It struck Garrus that it was the first of _those_ smiled she’d tossed his way since before Sidonis, and that he’d missed it, like she was water and sunlight and he was wilting. It was the first of _those_ smiles since she’d stared down the scope of his rifle, the barrel still hot from the shot he’d taken despite her desperate attempts to dissuade him. She’d been in his damn sights and he tracked her every move, finger on the trigger. He would never take a shot that put her at risk, of course, but that didn’t change the nightmares he’d been having about having her in his sights, a breath from squeezing the trigger. He would _never._ If she had insisted, he would not have betrayed her wish for mercy, but in the end she’d let him make the choice.

She hadn’t given Mordin that choice. She hadn’t given Jack that choice. Why him?

She’d stared into his scope and condemned him with her eyes.

_She sees a monster._

His eyes slid away from contact, and Garrus wondered when he’d be able to meet her level, wry gaze again. _Honey colored_ , Thane had called them. There used to be other reasons he couldn’t make eye contact with Shepard-- she’d been his Commander, his superior officer. You didn’t look a superior in the eye unless you challenged them, and Garrus had only dared that a few times-- with Dr. Heart, when she’d freed the Rachni Queen.

There was no hero worship in his own eyes now, not as there had been before Omega, before Sidonis and the rocket to the face and the smart bandage that had become part of his painful daily routine to minimize scarring when really he wanted it to be _worse_. Before Alchera, and two years without her, before Cerberus and the glowing scars.

Stripped of their trappings, their insulation in the form of C-Sec officer, of Alliance Commander, they were now two bare wires that couldn’t come within a few meters of each other without screeching feedback that sent everyone running with their hands clapped over their aurlas.

“That may go down in history as the shortest interrogation ever,” Thane rumbled.

“Get what you need?” Garrus asked, blinking his expression into coolness as he pushed off the wall to trail along behind the two.

“We did. I had no idea humans found Spectre status so terrifying. I believe he urinated himself. That’s the second pair of pants today, Shepard.”

She laughed.

Damn it, when had Krios gotten _funny_? Garrus really had no chance, with a man like Krios making her laugh. Stoic, mysterious, deadly at any range, biotics singing across the battlefield, his perfect words comparing her to gods, and those bottomless eyes and perfect memory that promised to hold and cherish her every moment for the rest of his… life. And now he was _funny?_

Humor had been the only thing giving Garrus an edge, that and his head for calculus.

_And his life expectancy...._

The bitter thought punched through him, followed quickly by shame. How dare he think such things about Thane… how dare he…

When had he become so bitter?

Sidonis was dead, so why did he feel _worse?_

Later, Garrus watched as Shepard stalked the catwalks. Thane was nowhere to be seen, but the comm banter between them was quiet and urgent. The fear in Thane’s voice was easy to pick out if you knew how to listen, and Garrus had nothing else to do but ponder the nature of this mission, and why the hell he was there at all.

He followed along, pretending to browse the shops and then stroll through the apartment corridors like he wasn’t trailing Shepard above, or Krios wherever _he_ was, until suddenly, there was Kolyat Krios, pointing a gun at an unarmed turian, shaking.

“This… this is a joke. Now? _Now_ you show up?” the young man spat, and Garrus recognized that tone when cast towards an absent father who thought he knew something of the man his son had become.

Thane wilted into failure when faced with defusing the situation. Shepard took over, shooting a lamp and slamming into young drell. Garrus watched her hands twist and maneuver Koylat’s pistol from his numb fingers like she was drawing runes in the air, and Thane stepped forward. Finally. Bailey and his C-Sec team burst in, the lights flashing high relief over the dimmed apartments, and the mark stumbled away, and security closed in.

It was the precise opposite of what had unfolded just a ward over, just days ago. An assassination, a confession, but this time, there was no blood.

There had been enough of that already.

“Your mother,” Thane said softly, and the room fell silent. “They killed her to get to me. It was my fault.”

“What,” Kolyat said, taking a step forward.

Thane laid out his confession, line by line, how he’d killed his wife’s murders and lost his son in the process, and Garrus watched Koyat as the drell wavered between taking another step forward and falling back, retreating from his father's open and profuse emotions.

“Kolyat… I have taken many bad things out of this world. You’re the only good thing I’ve ever put back into it.”

It seemed the whole room held it’s collective breath. The red strobe caught the younger drell’s tears as they streamed openly down Kolyat’s cheeks, and Thane stepped close, pressing his forehead to his son’s in a gesture that struck Garrus as utterly turian, with one difference.

Garrus didn’t know that drell could cry.

Garrus was held captive by the moment, awed by the vulnerability, the raw emotion, until he felt Shepard shift beside him. She watched Thane, expression soft and profoundly sad, unguarded for the moment, and Garrus suddenly saw the thing that had been growing between the Commander and the assassin bloom into full spectrum color.

_She loves him._

Garrus swallowed hard, his mandibles danced wide just once as the war between amusement and annoyance called a ceasefire and shot the red flares of surrender. A new front had opened up, waging a war of attrition, and it was called despair.

How had he been so blind to his own needs that she’d gotten that far from him? She’d died, and that had been the end of all reason. He’d gone to Omega and that had been the end of all sanity. But then… she’d come back, saved him twice over, and here he was, still neither sane or reasonable, and it wasn’t what she needed.

His heart broke now, watching her lead father and son back to the quiet safety of C-Sec.

Garrus stood stoic as Shepard paced, and they waited while Thane and Kolyat talked in a private room. Shepard spoke quietly with Bailey, then fell to silence, shifted from foot to foot, not saying anything. It was the worst sort of silence.

He cleared his throat, his mandibles flared, and she looked at him, staring at her with his mouth open. He couldn’t say what he wanted now. The enormity of his feeling, and his guilt choked him, and Garrus wished sorely in that moment that Turians _could_ cry.

Fuck. He was an idiot. Hurting her by not being there because she’d _died_ and he’d _lost it_ and… fuck.

_She’d died. What was I supposed to do?_

He stifled a keen, the pain of the past two years without her, his Commander, his best friend rising in his chest to sweep away everything else… the person he cared more about than anyone else in the Galaxy… _including himself…_ and there it was. That was the problem right there.

He was going to have to start caring for himself if he was ever going to hope that he could properly care for her.

_She may have died, but I’d never come back to life after losing her, not really._

Not until now.

Thane approached after what felt like an eternity, eyes sad and bottomless, and when Bailey started talking about pressing charges Thane flinched, and finally Garrus found his voice.

“Community service,” Garrus rumbled, and Shepard and Thane both turned to look at him.

Bailey blinked. “For attempted murder?”

“Don’t book it. Keep it in C-Sec. Convince the mark not to press charges.” Garrus waved his fingers like he was tossing money to someone. “Give him work, something to focus on. People like Kolyat need something to focus on.”

The human fell silent for a moment, and then he sighed. “Of course this is coming from you, Vakarian,” Bailey said. “The amount of red tape--” Bailey's eyes went unfocused in a look of creeping horror that Garrus recognized. Paperwork. Then the human sighed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

~~~

It was deep into the night cycle when Garrus stumbled into Shepard leaving life support. He’d been on his way back from the bathroom. He froze, wrapped his robe around himself, and stared.

She saw him and nodded, murmured a greeting, and he opened his mouth to speak, say something that would make her stay or follow him back to the main battery, but instead he just flared his mandibles at her.

Her eyes were puffy, not like she’d been crying but like she hadn’t been sleeping. The damn insomnia again. It was so much worse since Cerberus had raised her from the dead.

He knew, because she used to come see _him_ when she couldn’t sleep. SR-1 had given them lazy, stolen hours in the Mako, side by side in the front bench, her always on the driver’s side, him always trying to get her to laugh.

The SR-2 found her quieter, more reserved and him more angry. They still talked every day. She’d sit for twenty minutes at a time, a few times a day, legs folded under her in that mind bendingly human way, in shorts or sweatpants, in a hoodie. It was harder to get her to laugh now, but he still tried.

Well, he’d tried at least until he’d gotten wind of Sidonis. But Sidonis was dead now, in part thanks to Shepard… and yet, it was Life Support where she was spending all of her free and sleepless time now.

He glanced at the door to Life Support, and the holographic lock glowed red. He frowned again, another flare of his mandibles, feeling off balanced, puzzled by the sudden encounter and his intrusive bitterness.

Shepard gave him one last look, hard and hurt, and fled to the elevator.

Five minutes later found him knocking on her door. The lock was green.

“Come in,” came a muffled reply, and the door slid open.

He hesitated, framed in the doorway as she peered at him from the end of her bed. She wore shorts and sat with her legs crossed in that impossible human way.

“Garrus,” she said. She didn’t seem surprised to see him, but she looked weary. He wanted her to sleep.

“Shepard... “ his voice flanged, and he made it down the stairs almost without stumbling. Her first name was in his mouth before he could stop it, hung in the air between them. “Wren. I’m…”

“Stop right there,” she said.

He froze, and she unfolded from the bed, swayed over to him like she swayed when she was messing with an opponent on the battlefield, and was about to do something incredibly stupid and she was teasing out the moment before she dropped the bomb, and his eyes were on the bare, soft skin of her calves, her thighs, her hips and then her eyes were locked to his and...

_Spirits._

“I have some things to say to you,” she said softly. “Sit.”

He obeyed, following her gesture towards the bed. The mattress groaned beneath his weight and then shifted further as she came to rest next to him. He could feel the heat from her, half an arm’s reach away.

“What happened on the ward--”

“I know,” he said. “I compromised your integrity."

"Integrity?" She laughed, sharp and bitter. "How can you say that? I'm fucking  _Cerberus._ "

"Integrity, Wren." His voice was just as sharp, with with insistence, and not bitterness. "Don't give a damn what colors you're wearing, or who pays you. Your integrity... it's the thing I lo--” the word choked him. But there had been too much silence between them for him to fail now. He’d failed too much in the past two years, and he was done failing, even if it meant shattering his pride. “The thing I love most about you, and I completely disregarded your concerns. I’m sorry..”

“Love?” She was going to go there, then. He’d said it. She’d finish it.

“Love,” he confirmed. “And I blew it.”

“No,” she said. “It was my fault. I questioned you. You knew what you needed to get closure, and I treated it like… I knew… what you went through on Omega. When… I was dead.”

The word fell out and landed between them like a dead thing itself. Suddenly she crumpled, just _folded_ in half and he’d never seen her like that before. She made a strangled noise and for a horrible second he thought she was choking on something but then her breathing stuttered rhythmically and she began to cry.

He raised a hand and placed it gently on her shoulder. Warmth radiated through her t-shirt, and he felt her body shake through quiet tears. His hand slipped over the broad plane of her shoulders, rubbing between the two sharp blades of bone in easy circles, feeling muscle flex and jump as she fought for breath.

“You’re back, though,” he said, helpfully. She hiccoughed, and leaned against him.

“Am I?” She sounded miserable.

“The shoulder of my robe didn’t get wet on its own. Last I checked, dead people don’t cry.”

He felt her body rise in a huff of laughter before she settled against him again, and they sat in pensive silence for a while. His hand continued to rub her back in gentle circles.

“I just… couldn’t lose you to that… thing that was eating you. I’m so fucking selfish.”

Was that why they hadn’t spoken in days? Because she was afraid that she’d… imposed her integrity upon him? She had, in a way, but he’d needed her to. He  _needed_ her. Since the begining he'd needed her in a way he didn't understand. He'd needed her his entire life. 

And damn it, but he was _ashamed_ that he’d needed her to help him resolve the bullshit that had been Omega, the utter void she'd created when she'd died, and _that_ was why he couldn’t meet her eyes.

He wasn’t strong enough.

Not for her.

No one was.

Maybe Krios was. Maybe.

“I shouldn’t have been lost in the first place. You’re _here_.”

She hummed, shifted, pushing away from him slowly and crawling into bed. He stood up and took a step towards the door, mandibles flapping as he thought about saying a million things to her.

_Goodnight. I love you. You should rest. I love you. See you tomorrow. I love you. I’m worried for you. I love you. I’m an idiot. I love you. I'm so sorry. I love you._

“Stay,” she said. It was almost a question. Definitely not an order.

“Okay,” he said, and it was easy to walk around the side of the bed and lay beside her. He thought fleetingly of awkward love triangles, of what might have passed between Krios and Shepard in the late hours down in Life Support, but then he caught the scent of her hair----

_Lillies, lillies. Pure white flowers in a crested wreath at the base of her photograph at the memorial. Lilies were a tradition at human funerals, to cover the stench of embalming and decay back before there was cremation and bio reclamation. There had been no smell of rot to hide, of course, because if there had been a body, she would not be here now._

It had been the worst sort of tragedy at the time, to know she was just _gone_ , leaving those who loved her without even a physical tether to her death.

Now he could not call her anything other than a miracle.

She got under the covers, smoothing the blankets, and her hand reached out and took one of his.

He smoothed back the black fringe of hair from her face with his other hand, and she hummed, almost like a turian might when someone close preened their crest. Her eyes-- Thane’s comparison to honey, sweet and brown, sang in his mind-- sank closed. Tear tracks dried slowly, and her breathing steadied and deepened.

She slept. He watched her for an hour, marveling at the rise and fall of her chest, the miracle of each breath, the smell of lilies invading the abandoned war in his heart, battlefield littered with the detritus of jealousy and fear and grief until the smell of lillies didn’t mean her death anymore but just _her_ and whatever _she_ meant. And then he slept too.

If he woke up with her back pressed to his keel, nestled in his arms, his tough and angular body curled around her soft and flowing one, she didn’t say anything about it.

He deflected. Made some stupid joke about how hard human beds where when the species as a whole was so soft. She laughed, but he saw a flush creep across her cheeks, dark and warm, and her smile was not wry but small, embarrassed. Happy. That as a new smile from her.

She got dressed in her Cerberus black-and-whites with him still in the room. He watched the fish, but he could see her reflection in the glass, dark skin and easy curves.

If Thane was smiling faintly, shrouded in stoicism and a timeless sense of patience when they came out of the elevator together and walked into the mess, Garrus pretended not to notice.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Thane and Garrus are absolute dorks.

 

 

**Thane**

 

 

“So, what do you… do in here all day, exactly?” Garrus asked, looking around Life Support from where he sat across from Thane. The room was bare, almost shamefully so. A small cot lined the wall behind Thane, and half a dozen firearms sat in the display cases Thane had modified over the past few weeks aboard the _Normandy._ Everything else he owned, which amounted to a few changes of clothes and one or two personal mementos, was stored out of sight.

Thane followed Garrus’s gaze around his quarters, and for a moment he was reminded of the irony, that the room he had taken up residence in was called “Life Support.” He liked to remind himself of the synchronicity; it reminded him that he was on borrowed time, that this mission was the only thing keeping him tethered to the Galaxy.

That… and now he had Kolyat to think of again. Ten years gone was too long to make up for, but there was a sense of genesis Thane could not deny, something newly fertile that began with the gentle flow of Kolyat’s tears as Thane told his son how much he loved him.

 _Siha_ had given him that. Given him Kolyat, walked with him every step of the way, saw him through each moment, even the moments Thane would rather have kept private, moments full of weakness, and shame, and doubt. But she did not flinch or avert her eyes, or condemn him for his failures or make excuses for his weakness. She was simply his witness, leaning into his story…

_Words catch, fluttering in your throat as Kolyat presses the gun to the turian’s fringe, inexpert. At that angle he’ll miss, blow off half the mark’s skull and leave it spattered across the room. Everyone covered in gore: himself, his father, Shepard, Garrus… Koylat is not a killer, does not have the calm presence of mind to apply the tools of death’s trade appropriately. Shepard takes a potshot, Koylat jumps, she steps in, disarming him him of damnation…_

_The words come: 'I’ve taken many bad things out of this Galaxy. You are the only good thing I’ve put into it.'_

_Kolyat cries. Foreheads press together, intimate and sorrowful, and the surrender radiates into the room. Irikah_ _is their for the barest of moments, wrapping everyone in in her multitude of wings, and then Shepard takes her place._

Aside from the catharsis of it, acknowledging and setting aside the tragedy that had been seeing Irhaka staring back at him from Kolyat’s eyes… now that he could set down the worry and the guilt for a while, knowing that Vakarian was working with Bailey to find a way to keep Kolyat out of trouble on the Citadel while his father made one more suicidal move towards death…

All of it aside… the mission had been… _fun._

Thane had expected interrogating Elias Kelham to take a bit of finess, some effort and teamwork on both their parts. He thought Shepard would want to play bad cop, flex her interrogation skills, play off his measured approach, but instead she marched in, dropped her Spectre status, and Kelham had given up his contract, and _actually_ urinated in his pants.

It was yet another moment when Shepard took his breath away. It was probably telling of something, that a woman who literally scared the piss out of criminals left him in awe… and it made sense that Vakarian felt the same way, given his predilection towards vigilantism. Thane collected those moments of awe, hoarded them like precious coins, and slowly, without his realizing, the moments began to add up, making him rich in reasons to stay alive.

_See out the mission. Be a father. Fall in love._

And then there was Vakarian. Thane was not quite sure where he fit into the complicated set of equations that added up to his will to live, but here the man was, guileless and imploring and desperate for some kind of insight into the woman who they both had feelings for.

“Meditation,” Thane said in response to his question. What else did he do here, in Life Support? “Research. Contemplation. Rest.”

_Breathe._

“And… when Shepard visits you here?”

Thane blinked once, nictitating membrane and then the shutter of his outer lids dancing over his eyes in rapid succession as he fixed Garrus with a pointed stare. Garrus sat easily, posture open and slightly… defeated, as if he already knew what Thane was going to say.

“We talk. Of our lives. Of human and drell philosophy.” And then, Thane’s next words clearly surprised him. “And… we hold hands.”

Garrus’s expression shifted from skirting defeat to startled. His eyes dropped to study his hands, folded atop the table. And then it was Thane’s turn to be surprised as Garrus looked up, mandibles flickering and eyes soft with genuine amusement. He smiled. No cruelty, or self satisfaction that the answer Garrus had been expecting and dreading had not been forthcoming. He looked like… well, Thane had seen similar expressions on Shepard’s face when playing with the small, furry earth animal she called a hamster. Garrus looked, for all the stars like he had just heard something… adorable.

“Hold… hands. Huh. That’s...” Vakarain stifled a soft, chortle of a laugh, bleeding into Thane's memory.

_Warm skin, without scale or fused digits, but textured nonetheless, endless variation in her prints, fine lines spiraling into larger ones, arches, vectors, scars, burns, calluses, all form patterns unique to her alone. A thumb and forefinger slide along either side of the membrane between middle and annular fingers, exploring their fusion. Not suggestive, but suggesting.  
More._

“I want more,” Thane said aloud, voice low and heady in his throat, unable to hold back as the memory swelled, crested, and then broke him back into reality.

It was Garrus’s turn to blink, and Thane huffed a breath in frustration he slid back into the present. He was too easily lost in memory of late, even one so recent as Shepard rubbing her thumb down the fused membrane between his fingers in fascination, unable to keep from blurting out his final thoughts from that moment, thoughts that echoed now as the sensation of her hand in his faded.

Thane shifted slightly in his seat. “Forgive me,” he said, tone careful, measured as he watched Garrus. Turians were on the whole rather open about sex, and desire, but they also had a reputation for being territorial with mates. Garrus’s reaction would tell Thane a good deal about how he viewed Wren, and how Thane should proceed. “During meditations I slip so easily into memory.”

“I stayed the night with her,” he blurted out. “Just… kept her company. She hasn’t been sleeping and I think another person there seemed to help.”

Ah. So Garrus teetered on the precipice, not causal, no, but not devoted either. Just being of service. Falling back on his duty to aid for a struggling comrade as guide. He didn’t know which way to fall just yet.

“I know,” Thane replied. “The rest of the crew believe she might not need the trappings of life, like food, or sleep, but even I can see she needs rest.”

_Even you can see…_

For too long, Thane had seen Shepard as transcendent, some holy being of protection and wrath, given back to the Galaxy by some unseen hand. Watching her perform moral alchemy on Garrus’s need for revenge had left him in awe, but every step towards Kolyat brought him closer to understanding Shepard. She was a _siha_ , but that did not make her untouchable, free of desire or regret. Thane should have known… he’d loved a _siha_ before, with all her faults and failings.

Thane put Shepard on a pedestal, high out of his reach simply so he would not reach for her. They were both safer that way…. And yet...

As he’d come to know her better, the trappings of Commander were slowly being stripped away, the pedestal descending from its distant heights, and he saw her more simply, with more clarity than the Alliance, or Cerberus, or even Shepard herself would likely be comfortable with. She was just a person.An incredibly talented person, who wore the brunt of savior and warror like a mantle instead of a lodestone around her neck, but a person none the less.

And it made her very difficult not to reach for.

Commander Shepard was a hero, an icon… but Wren? Wren was lonely, and kind to her friends, terrible to her enemies, and brilliant. Her engineer’s mind was cool and precise, but she had a shy warmth that often took Thane by the sweetest of surprise. And she was hurting, in the wake of newly restored life, reaching out for something, grasping for… what Thane was not sure, but he thought it might… it might be love.

Certainly not sex. If it was just sex, she would have had Vakarian on his back already, or shown interest in human crew members, like Jack, or Jacob, who might be physical but required emotional space, who would keep her at a great distance which could not be crossed.

No, there was something more than sex that Wren Shepard needed, or at least Thane assumed that was it. He would have to ask her, get her to open up, but based on his observations of her with Garrus, and the way she was with himself, he believed he had enough information to make a few informed assumptions about the reserved and private woman behind Commander Shepard.

And… if Shepard could will things to suit her needs, then perhaps Thane could as well. Normally he let fate flow through him, carried on endless waves out to the sea of eventuality, let his life reach it’s already forgone conclusion, but once… once in a while, there was disruption.

_Choice._

And Garrus was currently forming a rather large disruption in Thane’s flow. Garrus was asking for him to make a choice. Or perhaps just gathering enough information that he might be able to do so himself, but none the less, the moment required action.

“It is always a pleasure to speak with you, Garrus, but I get the sense that you’ve come with an agenda prepared for this meeting.”

“Yeah.” Garrus huffed a gentle laugh. “I’m pretty transparent, huh? I think… I _\--We_ should do something for her. Something nice. Take her mind off all the bullshit Cerberus has been throwing at us. Horizon was a joke… but the Collector ship? It’s like they’re _trying_ to kill her. Again.” Garrus shuddered, and his gloved talons skittered over the metal of the table as his hands tightened into fists.

They could not speak freely anywhere on the Normandy, not with an AI reporting their every breath to Cerberus, but it was easy to read Garrus’s thoughts-- Cerberus had to go, and soon. The man laid it all bare, wore his intentions like another set of armor.

But in the meantime, they _should_ do something nice for Shepard.

And Garrus’s use of the word “we” did not go unnoticed.

“Did you have something in mind?”

“I don’t know.” The dual flanged voice washed over Thane like a blast from a furnace, or a freezer. It was difficult to tell if Garrus ran hot or cold: he was cold fire burning with frustration at inaction, raging against helplessness and injustice and… just burning brightly.

Garrus kept on, talons clicking on the table as he began to strategize. “Look. I have no romantic skills to speak of. Never have. Never needed them. If she wanted sex, she’d have asked for it by now.” Thane hummed in agreement. “Do you think she’s… trying to decide between us?” The words dragged out of him.

“No,” Thane said. “I think she will _not_ decide. I think she intends to walk into this suicide mission alone, because she is afraid of complicating your deeply necessary friendship, as she is afraid of replacing a dying man’s wife.”

Garrus stared at him for a moment, head rocking back slightly as he considered Thane’s words.

“Deeply necessary?”

Thane nodded. “Indeed.”

Garrus seemed to reach beyond the moment, as if he was lost in his own memories, however imperfect they might be.

“There are people closer to home,” Garrus grumbled after a moment, echoing Thane’s thoughts from earlier.

“They would not give her what she requires.”

“So you’re a Shepard expert now?”

Thane caught a surge of protectiveness in the eye-chipped blue of Garrus’s eyes, the hardening of his expression, the subtle challenge in the jut of his head.

Thane shook his own head slightly, shifting his hands to an open, humbling posture. “Simply observant of the time we have spent together, and of her time with others. I am… attentive.”

“And what, exactly, is it that you think she needs?” Garrus’s voice was a low thrum, torn between the realization that Thane was indeed deeply invested and Shepard, and yearning for his insight. “Wants… whatever.”

Thane thought perhaps that he should teach the younger man some meditation techniques, help him attempt to calm that hot, literal mind into something more honed.

And yet.

And yet, it worked for him. It certainly worked for Thane. He liked the thought of getting caught up in Garrus’s passions, especially when they were shared.

Like Shepard.

The thought was intrusive, and Thane waited patiently for it to depart, folding his hands back into a pose that recycled his body’s energy instead of bleeding it out into ether as Garrus let his go, taking up massive amounts of psychic space in the quiet of Life Support.

“I believe she requires trust and devotion. _Tu-fira._ To be lost in another.”

“Yeah,” Garrus murmured, his aggression curbed as suddenly as it came on. “I can do that. Get lost in her. Could you?”

“It is already too late for me. I am lost. As I said, I want more.”

Garrus nodded. “Okay. Well. We should do something about it.” His eyes flicked up the the ceiling the way some people did when talking to computers that lacked a physical presence, as if they just floated around in the ether, waiting to be summoned. “EDI?”

“Yes, Officer Vakarian?”

“Can you send me a list restaurants that have levo-dextro menus on the Citadel.”

“Sending you a complete list.”

Garrus’s eyes widened as the holo of his omnitool lit up his wrist. “Spirits, there’s over three hundred places in Zakera ward alone.” He tapped through the list, mandibles tight to his face in concentration, like he was hunting through evidence that might give him a lead on a particularly challenging case. Thane was content to watch him work, a slow smile just touching the corners of his mouth.

“EDI, can you narrow this to places that have… a quiet atmosphere. Nothing too fancy. Some private seating.”

“I would suggest finding a place where the owners and staff are discrete,” Thane added.

“Avoid the press, right. Do you have any dietary needs?”

Thane sat up, a sudden rush of blood warming the frills on the side of his throat. “Drell do not eat grains, legumes, or plants high in alkaloids.” he said, his speech careful.

_Was he asking..._

“Add it to the search criteria EDI.”

“Affirmative. Results narrowed to eight restaurants on Zakera ward.”

“Wow,” Garrus said. “Drell dining isn’t very accesablie, is it?”

Thane shook his head slowly, not quite sure what Garrus was up to. He blinked again, letting his mind catch up with the sudden increase in his heart rate, letting his frills settle before he spoke.

“Are you suggesting I come to dinner with you and Shepard?” Thane had not taken the “we” in his phrasing as literally as that, that they should act together… that he would be _included_ in whatever plans Garrus had for Shepard. He had thought the man was merely seeking advice.

“Yeah. That’s what we’ve been talking about this whole time, right? The three of us, going to dinner?” He didn’t wait for a reply as he plunged back into the data.

“For someone who lacks romantic skills, you are certainly taking to the task with a will.” The words were out before Thane could help them. That seemed to happen more often around Garrus then he was strictly comfortable with.

“Never really been sure of the difference between talent and a lot of effort,” Garrus said absently, not looking up from his omni, and Thane couldn’t help it. He laughed, low and long, head tilting to the side to study Garrus anew. Yes, there was that easy humor that Wren so loved in him. It shone brightest in him when he wasn’t trapped in his own head, when he was kept busy, was… taking care.

Garrus looked up from his list of restaurants and grinned, a lopsided look that promised trouble.

“Do you own civilian clothes?” Thane asked, taking in the battered armor. That would not do, not at all.

Garrus’s grin went slack as horror dawned. “Shit. No.... I left Omega with nothing but my armor and my Mantis. Hell, I left half my _face_ behind on Omega.” His talons reached up to touch the smart bandage across one side of his face as those imperfect memories surfaced.

Thane steepled his hands, drawing Garrus’s eyes back from their thousand yard stare, and let let his own smile increase by a few degrees, studying the broad line of Garrus’s shoulders, the length of his arms, the subtle blue cast to his silver plates and the bold cerulean of his clan markings.

“Leave that to me,” he said.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Shepard gets some POV time to weigh in on this whole situation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wren Shepard is a Spacer/Akuze Survivor/Sentinel. She is demisexual. Just a heads up that while she is on the asexual spectrum, there will be mature/explicit rated sex with her in later chapters once she's in love for real. Just want any ace folks reading to be aware that this is where the fic is heading. I'll give content warnings on explicit chapters.
> 
> I've never written a demisexual character before, though I'm demi myself. We'll see how this goes.
> 
> Also, you guys... thank you so much??? For your reviews and your encouragement!! It's magnificent. I'm so glad you are enjoying this story. I love writing it. It keeps getting bigger on me-- looks like it'll be 10 chapters because I'm weak for my OT3 and so glad to finally be working on a story for them.

 

 

****Shepard** **

 

 

“So, we’ve got some shore leave coming up,” Garrus said, hand braced in the shuttle’s crash webbing, his voice a low purr that made Shepard glance up at him with a cocked eyebrow.

“Yep,” Shepard said, “shore leave.” She shot him a funny look before returning to pick at the encrypted code code they had found on the body of the Cerberus agent down on Lorek.

Shepard’s mind was far from thoughts of shore leave as it raced ahead of the shuttle’s flight path to start in on her to-do list on the _Normandy_. She had reports to write, requisitions to approve, an IFF retrieval operation to plan for with Miranda, and a distractingly deep and acute pain in her shoulder… Chakwas was _actually_ going to kill her if she had torn her rotator cuff again. Shepard rolled her shoulder, wincing and rubbing at it through her armor as she added a stint in the regenerator to the to-do list. And this code was not cooperating at all. No way she was going to crack it with just her omnitool. She sent it to EDI for closer inspection.

She _definitely_ wasn’t thinking about shore leave.

And yet… Garrus clearly was. He hummed thoughtfully, leaning into his grip on the crash webbing above his head. “Back to the Citadel. Do you want to get dinner with Thane and I while we’re there?”

It took a moment for her brain to snap back to the shuttle and catch up with her ears.

“I’m sorry. I think that last concussive round I took is messing with my hearing implants. Do I want to _what _?”__

Thane sat pole-straight in one of the center-facing jump seats, hands folded in his lap, inscrutable black eyes watched her. She thought a faint smile drew up at the corners of his mouth, but it was difficult to tell in the dim shuttle light.

She glanced over at Garrus, his body curved into a gentle lean that leant him this air of utter… Garrus-ness.

Shepard scowled at him and his Garrus-ness. It really wasn’t fair how Garrus-ish he was, with his cocky banter, the way they worked together to make the field a deadly sea of technical traps and terrifying tactics, how easy he made it for her to be around. His confidence. How he sometimes became aware of his confidence, which spooked him back towards that awkward junior officer he used to be, the one she’d met all those years ago... It was confidence born of… how had Joker so elegantly put it? Ah yes, confidence born of “taking the stick out of his butt and beating guys to death with it.”

Yeah, that was it.

She pressed her lips together, using her __own__ stick to beat back the still lingering sense panic that had been eating away at her ever since she’d watched her dearest friend struggle with his profound grief. She still couldn’t look at him without seeing it all laid bare before her, painfully obvious to her now, after their __last__ night docked on the Citadel, after saving Thane’s son from the precipice of disaster, when Garrus had come to her finally, no more excuses for his absence, or hard stares full of silence and hurt and longing-- and she’d cried and he’d stayed with her, and brushed the hair from her face, and she woke within the reassuring tangle of his arm-- and it felt like __home.__

It was __painfully__ obvious to her now that he wasn’t just grieving his lost team, as fresh as those wounds were. He was still grieving __her.__

“Go to dinner,” Garrus repeated. “With Thane and I. Just… get away from all the... mercs, and Cerberus, and the explosions and people trying to kill us for just a few hours. With the shore leave coming up, I thought maybe...”

“With __both__ of you?” Shepard tried to swallow the lump forming in her throat, composed of nerves and shock and…

_Aliens _._ _

She needed to do some research about aliens and polyamory.

Thane tilted his head to the side, studying her. “It was Garrus’s idea,” he said. “I would never be so presumptuous… but since he’s asking, I intend to take advantage of the opportunity.”

His expression was cool, carefully schooled as she turned her narrowed her eyes on him. He definitely trying not to smirk, pleased with himself, a little sly. He was __teasing__ her. And… _Garrus._

Her eyes continued to narrow until they were little slits of suspicion, and Garrus popped his hip into that casual, cool-guy lean, and Thane sat like the axis upon which an entire world turned.

“Like… a date?” She forced the word out like the foreign thing it was. It wasn’t possible. No one asked her out. She might have had a sleepover with Garrus when she broken down enough for him to feel __sorry__ for her, she might have held Thane’s hands in Life Support while he told her of the tragedy that was his life, and she told him of the disaster that was her’s, but… that was different. That was simple intimacy, sweet companionship. Friendship. That was __safe.__

But… a date? She hadn’t been on a date in… gods, had it really been five years? Certainly before all the Prothean beacon nonsense, before Saren and the Geth. Before she’d died. She’d been __dead__ for two years, for chrissakes.

_Maybe you’re being a little hard on yourself._

But surely it was just a friendly overture… lately the two were thicker than thieves, anyway. They must think she was wound up too tight, maybe thought a night on the town was just the thing to get the uptight Commander Shepard to chill the fuck out for five fucking minutes and...

Garrus flicked his mandibles in a hesitant smile. “Yeah… that is if… Hmm. Well, if you want it to be a date. Yeah. I’d like that. If not, then… it’s just a friendly dinner. With friends. Up to you….”

“All right,” she said, allowing the flutter of nerves to wash through the jittery void of receding adrenaline.

“You don’t have to decide…”

“Something wrong with _your_ aurals?” She snapped, softening her words with a sudden, crooked grin that matched the careening, off kilter pounding in her chest, an uptick in her vitals that Garrus could no doubt see change in his visor’s biometrics. “I said, ‘all right.’”

Garrus looked shocked, but then something flashed in his eyes, bright and hard, and… it looked like triumph. “Oh-- I… I’ll uh… make the reservation, then.”

Thane chuckled, and she fixed _him_ with a stare.

“The two of you are _up to something_ ,” she said. “I don’t like it.”

Thane’s hand wafted vaguely in dismissal of her claim, but his smile was definitely visible now, and stayed put.

“So… what are you going to do with that intel?” Garrus asked, shifting back into work mode as quickly as he’d shifted out of it, leaving her reeling. Again.

She read the message that EDI had sent back to her regarding the data, and made her decision. “Sending it to the Alliance,” she grunted, gruff, trying to shake off the emotional vertigo. “Might buy me some goodwill. Besides, what the hell am I supposed to do with it? EDI said it’ll take her over two years to break the code, and… well. Who knows where we’ll be by then.”

She regretted the words as soon as they were out. Garrus shifted, and Thane stilled, and it was hard… hard, suddenly to reconcile getting asked out by her best friend… and also by proxy, the Galaxy’s most deadly assassin, all while running a suicide mission.

Not that long ago she _meant_ the ‘suicide’ in the suicide mission. She was willing to die again for the sake of the galaxy. It was, after all, what she _did_.

And yet… dying _again_ was dropping lower and lower down her to-do list. Especially because…. well, there was a pack of crazy people willing to follow her into hell, and… these two idiots were among them.

 

~~~

 

“EDI?”

The reply was prompt. “Yes, Shepard?”

“Do you know what Thane and Garrus are up to?”

“Up to, Commander? They are both several decks below your current location.”

Shepard huffed. “It’s an idi--”

“That was a joke,” EDI supplied.

“Got me,” Shepard said, exaggerating her sigh. “Can you review the shuttle flight recording from our return to the __Normandy__ from Lorek.”

There was a long pause, and Shepard stared out the viewport above her bed where she laid, sprawled with arms above her head. Her shoulder had quieted to a dull ache under Chakwas’ care. The woman was a miracle worker. Stars streaming past the viewport in a shift of blue as the __Normandy__ raced through the blackness towards the relay at lightspeed. Shepard watched the drifting shoals of stars drag their light trails, heart finding a higher rate to beat at than she cared for, as she thought about how thin a bulkhead was, how little it would take to crack the __Normandy__ like an egg __again__ , wondering if she would ever stop being a little frightened of the void.

“‘ _I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night,’_ ”she quoted, voice flat and swallowed by the too-large emptiness of her cabin.

That line had been true once, before the coldness of space had swallowed her, stolen her breath and silenced the beat of her heart, ripped her away from her work, her people, from everyone she loved. And yet… once she blacked out the memory of the pain that had seared her lungs, brain squeezing itself into paste as her skin burned on atmospheric reentry, once she let the pain go like she had learned to go of the acid burn agony of thresher maw spit, of the rending screams of her team-mates dying all around her on Akuze… of Alyn… gasping their last... Once she let the pain go it was just felt like she’d just fallen asleep, dreamed herself into forgetfulness, and the past two years had simply slipped by unnoticed until she’d found the will to wake again, and discovered the Galaxy upside down… discovered that her best friend was still alive, and that she was in love with him, and still there was room in her once-still but now beating-again heart for another man, a man who constantly surprised her with his grace, his kindness, his wisdom. His _attention _.__ Thane _saw her_ , in a way no one had ever seen her. And Garrus…

Damn.

_Selfish. Lonely. Delusions of love, the product of too much time spent isolated as you climbed your ambition, hid away from the aftermath of Akuze..._

She jumped when EDI spoke again. Shepard had forgotten that she’d the AI to review the shuttle ride conversation.

“I have observed the shuttle ride. Officer Vakarian asked you to dinner.”

“With Thane.”

“They wish to do something nice for you,” EDI said. “Garrus consulted me a few days ago about suitable restaurants on the Citadel.”

“Huh,” Shepard said.

“May I ask a question, Commander?”

“Go ahead, EDI.”

“Your Alliance personnel files list no known romantic or sexual relationships. Based on my observations around human mating customs and cultural preoccupations with sex, this seems unusual for humans.”

Ah, that. Before Akuze, it had been Alyn. Just Alyn. No way _that_ relationship was going to make it to the personnel files-- they’d have been court marshaled for fraternization. But after Akuze, after Alyn had…died, she couldn't face other people. Not with the acid scars covering sixty percent of her body ( _gone now that Cerberus had rebuilt her_ ), and the chronic pain ( _still there_ ), and the heartache ( _dull, but part of her forever_ ). Shepard had shut herself down, focused on her career, her training. N7. Commander. Council Spectre. Galactic badass. And it worked for her. She was content to be lonely at the top.

Besides, she’d never really experienced _lust_ , even before Akuze, never found that ineffable sense of libido, the need that people apparently felt in their bodies when looking at someone attractive. It just didn’t happen, not unless there was someone who she loved touching her, driving her towards that mysterious phenomenon called desire. She’d tried a few times since Alyn, but… it never felt right.

“Not always. Some humans don’t want sex, or feel romantic towards people. I can feel very romantic, but sex is something special. Rare. It’s been… a long time. I’m particular. I need a special connection in order to feel attraction to someone, and… military life doesn’t really allow for that. Too much moving around. Not enough privacy. Not enough time to develop the closeness I need in order to want to… Well…” She covered her eyes with the crook of her elbow. “Plus there are all the regs.”

_And the trauma._

“Cerberus has fewer personal restrictions placed upon its personnel,” EDI offered. “Are you interested in Thane and Garrus?”

Shepard swallowed the lump in her throat, the sudden rise of panic.

“Yes,” she managed. “I’m interested in both of them.” Somehow it was easier to admit that to an AI than it would have been to an organic friend, like Tali, or Kasumi, or even Joker-- the only three she could really imagine having this _mortifying_ conversation with. Perhaps it was that EDI didn’t really understand the concept of a crush, or romance, or love. Perhaps it was that EDI was the disembodied voice of Shepard’s ship, the ghost in the machine that haunted her beloved __Normandy.__ If she thought about it too hard, Shepard might come to the conclusion that she... loved EDI, too.

She chose not to think about it.

_You’ve gone and lost it good, Wren. Confessing grade school crushes on your teammates to your ship’s AI, because you can’t face the look on anyone’s actual face._

“Why so curious, EDI?” Shepard asked, trying to distract herself from the shame of her social ineptitude by becoming curious herself. It was her only failsafe plan; being curious about everything in the galaxy but her own self.

There was a brief silence. “I am trying to understand how organics relate to each other beyond my Cerberus programing. I do not think I can truly understand, but I am interested none the less. Especially in the personal experiences of people I know.”

“I’ll… let you know how it goes, then,” Shepard said, scratching at one of the faintly orange scars that crossed her jaw as she stared up at the stars.

 

~~~

 

The door to her cabin chimed once.

“Thane is outside your door, Commander,” EDI said over the intercom.

The _Normandy_ was docked at the Citadel, and Shepard had just released the crew for 48 hours of shore leave. She was about to take a shower and get ready to he was meet Garrus down stairs in two hour. They’d be meeting Thane for dinner later that evening, after a movie, and whatever else they decided to get up to. Probably shooting. That gave her two hours to figure out what in the hell she was going to wear. There was always that stupid leather dress Kasumi had given her for the graybox mission, or that white slip dress she’d picked up on Omega on a whim, but neither felt right. They made her feel plain. Neither was really __her.__ Of course, Shepard wasn’t quite sure __what__ she’d pick out for herself anymore, clothing wise. She hadn’t bothered with civies in _years_. Certainly not while she was dead.

Plain... that’s how she felt now, with Thane at the door. Shepard glanced down at her workout clothes and swallowed the too-familiar lump that rose in her throat.

“Come in,” she said, resisting the urge to smooth her hair.

The door slid open, smooth as the man who stood framed in it. For a moment his eyes darted around in that way he had when assessing a new space-- it was the first time he’d come to see her here. No doubt his training demanded it of him: assessing threats, escape routes, hiding places, potential cover, things to use as weapons. Her heart began that familiar ache that it liked to do for him, deep compassion and sorrow for the undeniable hell that had been his life up to this point.

At least until she noticed his clothes. Then… she became distracted.

He wasn’t wearing his field gear, the leather catsuit that hardly constituted as armor. Instead he wore an elegantly fitted, sand colored shirt and tight black trousers of some textured fabric she couldn’t name. Over the shirt he wore a soft white duster jacket that trailed to his knees, with a split up each side to the hip. He looked very… drell.

“Thane. You look… lovely.” She clasped her hands behind her back to keep from fussing with the hem of her tanktop.

He smiled, and inclined his head. “Thank you, _siha _.”__

“I thought you’d be heading to see Kolyat already.”

Thane stepped into her quarters and the smile that flitted across his face caused the knot in her throat to expand a little.

“Soon, _siha _.__ But I have something for you, first. I will not be offended if you don’t wish to accept, but… I imagine it has been difficult to do find things like this since Cerberus has left you little time for personal indulgences.” For the first time, she noticed the box in his hands. It was about the length of her forearm, pale gray. He covered the distance between them without hesitation and laid the box on her bed before turning to her.

“No, they really don’t give us much time, do they? Hence the… shore leave.”

This close, Shepard could see the remarkable texture of his face, the scales that lined his cheek ridges, and she could smell the spice-and-sun-warmed scent of him. She tried to swallow the lump in her throat.

She had never seen him smile so much as he had in the past few days.

“I will see you later this evening, _siha _,”__ he said. He lingered for a moment, and she watched him, slightly open mouthed. She felt like a fool as the most poised man in the galaxy stared into her eyes, twin black pools circled in the middle with the darkest green she’d ever seen.

He tilted his heat to the side, his own lips parting, and raised his hands, reaching for her. She took a step forward, not sure if she wanted to kiss him, or take his hands or… His wrists crossed, and the broad backs of his hands found her face in a soft whisper of scale and skin, easing along each side of her jaw. The gesture was unfamiliar, alien, not a human caress. It was perfectly symmetrical and measured. It brought up the same feeling as if he had pressed his lips to her forehead: chaste, sweet, adoring. Fused fingers pressed along her jaw, pinkies brushing her neck, where her frill would be if she were drell, and the back of his thumb traced the soft curve of her cheek, where she might have a raised ridge of skin and cartilage, like he had.

_God save me from the drell._

She leaned into the electric warmth of his touch for a moment before he gave her another of those increasingly abundant smiles. Then he was gone, as suddenly as he’d arrived, leaving her with no air in her lungs, and a box to investigate.

She stared at the door as it hissed closed behind him, wondering at the strange and flitting thing that had just passed between them, before turning her narrowed eyes to his mysterious gift.

“What are you up to, Thane?” She whispered, touching a hand to her cheek to trace the path the back of one of his hands had so recently taken.

Her hand dropped to the box and she lifted the lid, and found something wrapped in a sheaf of tissue paper. She brushed it aside to find a soft fall of fabric in a rich brown so dark it was nearly black. Sable, it was called. Just a shade lighter than the color of her hair. She touched the material, letting it slink through her hands like it was quicksilver, or cloud. Liquid or vapor, or perhaps a flickering of fire.

It was a dress.

A beautiful, perfect dress. Tiny threads of raw gold embroidery worked through the fabric up one side, winding like a geometric vein, or a heartbeat, catching the light until it resolved into a tessellating geometry of stars across the bodice and around the back.

Shepard swallowed the lump in her throat, and took it out of the box, letting the fabric run through her fingers, holding it up to her chest to let it fall against her body. It would somehow both cling to her and flow around her, like quicksilver, like fire, and she wondered what sort of fabric it was made of. She’d never seen anything like it, soft and uniform like silk but with a give like something synthetic.

Astounded, it took her a moment to notice that there was something else in the box. A pair of shoes: low and comfortable black leather sandals that would lace around her ankles, and a little square of stiff paper.

She lay the dress across the foot of her bed like it was a precious, delicate thing that she might ruin with her rough hands and crude handling, and picked up the card. A line of elegant, flowing script was written across in painstaking English.

 _ _“_ I have loved the stars too fondly…” _Gods, he remembered that story, she'd told him after Horizon, after Ashley had practically spat in her face. Of course he remembered. He was _drell._ The stupid poem about the dying astronomer… She and Ashley had memorized it one drunken night, night late in the hunt for Saren, after... after Alenko. A bottle of vodka and half a dozen half memorized poems later, and that was the only one she'd come out with, intact in her memory. She’d always loved that line as a teenager, moving from starship to starship with every new assignment the Alliance gave her mother, and she’d recited the poem for Thane when remembering Ashley. Ashley who now hated her.

Shepard’s face grew hot, her mind clouded, and above her in the viewport, all around the Citadel, pink shoals of dust danced in a nebulous haze.

Half blind, overcome, suddenly terrified, Shepard groped for the comm. “Kasumi… Are you still aboard?" She waited for a breathless moment and then Kasumi's wry, cheerful voice chirped back over the comm.

"Sure am. What's up?"

Relief flooded through Shepard like the opening of a floodgate.

"Can you… come up here?”

“Sure Shep. You okay? Sound like you’re choking….”

“I need some help… with my hair.”


End file.
